the best and wisest
by justjoy
Summary: He's only now realising that he had assumed that leaving would come with some measure of relief, some easing of his breath, but all Rafael feels now is tired. Because that'd be too easy, wouldn't it, and easy had kicked him from the bus and driven over him a long time ago. [post S19E13, "The Undiscovered Country".]
1. the best and wisest

Fin's hand snaps to his handphone the second it rings – he barely even needs to check the caller ID.

"Liv?" he says, and the word's like a magnet: Carisi glances up from his laptop immediately, and Rollins is already turning from where she's halfway through pinning a new set of photos to the board, striding over in brisk steps with the casefile still in her hands.

He doesn't even bother tacking on a question. They hadn't been able to stay in the courtroom past the opening statements, not even on a rotating basis – SVU had caught two new cases just after, and it was a unanimous agreement gone unspoken, that Liv should be the one to stay for the rest of it.

The verdict had come down the grapevine almost as soon as the jury returned it, of course, through Fin's contacts and Liv's texts and too bloody many news outlets to count, but for her to be calling now... something's happened, and bad.

"Fin," his lieutenant begins in that too-calm voice of hers. "Rollins and Carisi with you?"

Carisi's gone pale as a corpse, actually, his own phone in hand, and _dammit_ , Fin really hates it when he's right about things like this. "Yeah," he says anyway.

"Good." Liv exhales something like a sigh, though it's almost lost to the sound of traffic in the background. "Get them in my office and put me on speaker. There's something I have to tell you."

* * *

Rafael almost doesn't answer the knock on his door, at first. It's not that he doesn't want to see anyone, not even that there _aren't_ people he still wants to see, because there are – except, well.

He's only now realising that he had assumed that leaving would come with some measure of relief, some easing of his breath, but all Rafael feels now is _tired_. Because that'd be too easy, wouldn't it, and easy had kicked him from the bus and driven over him a long time ago. He liked challenges a bit too much sometimes, his professors had told him, and they'd been right. Challenges had teeth that bit and tore when you weren't looking, and even lawyers had to blink sometimes.

Thank goodness he'd already transferred all of his cases before the trial began, Rafael thinks, just as whoever it is knocks at the door again. "Rafael? You in there?" he hears a familiar voice say, and god, they're both getting too predictable for their own good.

He stares at the ceiling above his couch for a while longer before pushing himself to his feet, suddenly conscious of the fact that he's still wearing the same suit that he went to trial in – and wouldn't that have been ridiculous five ( _six_ ) years ago, being on the wrong side of the courtroom for once.

Rafael opens the door to find Olivia standing there, one hand raised halfway to knock again. "I didn't know you had my address," he says, because he doesn't know what else to.

"Trained detective, remember?" she answers wryly, raising an eyebrow.

It's nowhere near as impressive as his, of course, he thinks with a burst of muted amusement that fades just as quickly. Rafael only stops himself from leaning against the doorframe because she'd notice right away, and settles for crossing his arms. "Don't take this the wrong way," (not that he's sure what _that_ is at the moment, he doesn't think), "but what are you doing here, Liv?"

Liv looks at him for a small eternity.

"Because I couldn't – _we_ can't – just leave it at that," she says, finally. "I don't... it's selfish and it's stupid, Rafael, but I'm done with letting people walk away from me."

He keeps breathing. He's not sure he remembers how to do anything else.

"Not again, _not this time_ ," Liv whispers, fierce and blinding, and Rafael forgets even that, until –

"And I didn't want to be left explaining to Noah why he suddenly couldn't see his Uncle Rafa anymore," she adds, with the first real smile he's seen all day, and he can almost hear the air rushing to fill the sudden vacuum.

It takes him a moment to realise that he's half-smiling back, even if it's tentative and brittle around the edges.

Rafael bites back a groan, and lets himself lean against the doorframe anyway, appearances be damned. "That's emotional blackmail you're using, Lieutenant."

"Well," she says, and he wonders at how steady her words are. "Is it working, then?"

"No," lies Rafael, blatantly.

Liv's expression is edging dangerously close to a smirk, now. "Whatever you say, Rafa," she says in a passable imitation of the tone he takes with particularly ridiculous arguments, because he's clearly been a bad influence on her.

Then again, two can play at that game, Rafael thinks, narrowing his eyes. "You said _we_. Not the royal one, I'm assuming?"

"Can't get anything past you, can I?" she says, her grin melted into something softer.

It's obviously a rhetorical question. He shakes his head anyway. "I'm a very good lawyer, you know."

"The best," she corrects, and he almost doesn't catch the way her voice wavers, a little. "Everyone's downstairs, I told them to wait at the lobby."

For someone who's raised preparation to an art form, he's sure being blindsided a lot today. "I'm bad at goodbyes," Rafael hedges, and he gets the feeling that Liv would've rolled her eyes if this were any other situation.

"Good for you that this _doesn't have to be one_ , then," she says instead. "But only if you want to, Rafael."

Words desert him for the hundredth time today. "Everyone?" he manages to ask.

"Well, I couldn't get Rita Calhoun to come on short notice," Liv answers.

Her tone is dry enough that it surprises a breath of laughter from him. "Please don't, she'd probably end up charging one of us for her time."

"NYPD doesn't pay enough to cover _that_ ," she agrees with a wince, but the question's still there in her eyes, and –

Rafael can't help it; he nods before he can think too much about it, before he can second-guess like he's done with too many of his decisions lately.

This won't be among the worse ones, he can only hope, but it's hard to hold on to that skepticism in the colours of Liv's brilliant smile.

Then the elevator dings, Carisi and Rollins and Fin spilling out into the corridor with Jesse and Noah and what looks suspiciously like party supplies between them (only one of whom cannonballs into his legs in a curly-haired blur and a happy scream of _"Uncle Rafa!"_ , which is just as well, since Rafael doesn't fancy getting flattened by SVU's finest), and even the last of those doubts melt away.

"Guess we might've thrown together a farewell party for our ADA," Liv says with a straight face when he looks over in askance. "You coming?"

"What, were you just planning to start without the guest of honour?" Rafael fires back on reflex, and if he's maybe blinking too hard and pretending a little that the Noah-shaped barnacle is the only thing keeping him in place then no one needs to know – but for once, for these people, Rafael finds that he doesn't mind it too much anyway.

He wouldn't have missed this for the world.


	2. stood at bay

It hurts, a little different and a lot the same as it did outside the courthouse, to see Rafael standing there looking lost and unsure and not at all like the person she _knows_ him to be – but Liv blinks and he's still here, still not gone anywhere and she finds herself breathing a little easier, after all.

She shakes her head slightly, cutting off that train of thought as she waves vaguely towards the still-open door of his apartment. "Go make yourself look presentable or something, Noah and I can hold off the cavalry – right, Noah?"

Rafael gives her an unimpressed look at that, even though he's already turning, careful not to trip over Noah in the process. "I'm an unemployed tramp right now, Liv, I think that allows me some license to dress however I like."

She hears Fin snort in undisguised amusement behind her as they pile into the apartment. "Hate to break it to you, but you got a ways to go past sleepin' in suits before you reach that level, Barba."

"I'll take that under advisement, Sergeant Tutuola," Rafael snipes back over his shoulder, but Liv catches Rollins and Fin exchanging quick grins when Rafael turns away again to duck into his bedroom, and she's – ridiculously glad to see it, actually.

Liv's been blessed to have this squad, this team that's learned to read her and each other so well that they'd guessed what happened even though she only told them the bare facts (and nothing of the conversation that followed, although that's in no small part because Liv herself hasn't even had the chance to process those words yet – she needs a couple dozen pints of ice-cream and a crate of good wine before any of that happens, Liv thinks, because _god_ she loves the man like nothing else but Rafael Barba can be opaque as a lead wall at the best of times, and that's even _without_ him trying to be.)

In comparison, Carisi still seems unusually subdued, even as he heads straight to the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers with apparent familiarity. Fin's guess was that he'd heard something from his contacts in the DA's office, and Liv wouldn't be surprised at that – Carisi really _is_ the kind of person that people just want to tell things to, after all. But she also remembers the singleminded focus with which he'd pored over endless books in between long phonecalls with Dworkin, and makes a mental note to tell Rafael (though he probably already knows) that he _really_ needs to have a proper talk with Carisi about things going forward, whatever that entails.

Rollins and Carisi are almost done with doling out generous portions of pasta (quite a bit heavier than their usual party fare, true, but it's spaghetti night anyway and Liv knows for a fact that they've all barely had time for one square meal between them for the past week) when Rafael finally reappears in a singularly incongruous getup of a Harvard Law sweatshirt that's subtitled _What, like it's hard?_ over jeans and a nearly-familiar smirk, and Liv's breath skips a little at the sight, the relief almost a physical thing.

Rafael waits out the inevitable round of snickers before blithely asking "Good enough for a defense attorney, do you think?", which sets them all off again.

Rollins snorts so hard that she accidentally inhales her drink. "Who's seeing who in court now, huh," she says between coughs, and doesn't quite manage to stifle her wince when Noah hits her a bit too enthusiastically on the back, though she thanks him with watering eyes.

"Gonna join Calhoun over on the dark side, Barba?" Fin quips, but before Liv can glance over to see Rafael's reaction Carisi asks "How 'bout a legislator?" with a lopsided smile, and the conversation quickly degenerates from there into a mess of career switch ideas as they settle down to dinner, pulling a couple of extra chairs to the table.

Some of the suggestions are more questionable than others, Fin and Rollins apparently having fallen into a mild competition to outdo the other: private investigator is followed by yachting is followed (after a brief but heated debate over the merits of "yachter" versus "yachtsman") by secret agent, at which point Carisi clears his throat and intones, "The name's Barba. Rafael Barba."

 _That_ is followed by an entire twenty seconds' worth of complete silence, only broken by Rafael's very pointedly raised eyebrows.

"Excuse me," he says haughtily, dusting entirely imaginary lint off his sleeve as he somehow draws himself up to his full height even though he's still sitting down. "My suits are much better than anything the MI-6 could possibly afford, _thank_ you – "

"Hear, hear," Rollins says with an easy grin as she raises her drink, and Liv laughs, because she definitely _doesn't_ disagree, and meets it with her own.

"To Uncle Rafa's pocket squares," Liv declares loudly over the clink of glasses, just a bit giddy with something more than the wine she's drank.

Rafael scowls at Liv (or tries to, at least, though it's frankly unconvincing) and kicks her leg under the table.

He makes something close to an affronted yelp when she kicks back even though he really should've seen it coming, but for the first time all night she doesn't see that tightness around his eyes, and Liv thinks – yeah, she thinks that they're going be just fine.


End file.
